What Is Your Optimum Return On Investment?
When building a website and online marketing strategy a common question is: how much should we spend? To answer this you need to work backwards, starting with some of these questions:
- What is your overall marketing budget?
- What percentage of your turnover does this represent?
- What are the goals of your website?
- How are you going to measure its success?
- What kind of business and industry are you in?
- What is your risk profile?
The most important thing to establish are your online marketing goals. It will be impossible to measure return on investment if your goals are too general, such as ‘sell more units’ or ‘get more enquiries’.
No doubt the bottom line goal for every business is to increase profits, but Web 2.0 has changed the landscape for what smaller goals you might set along the way, and how you will achieve these. We work with a diverse range of businesses. Some sell directly online, others use their website to build awareness and reputation. Measurable goals that will contribute to your over ROI may include:
- Number of visitors, leads, sales, subscribers
- iPhone app downloads
- Facebook fans and likes
- Twitter followers
- eBook downloads
- trial software downloads
- YouTube views
- Donations
This list is by no means exhaustive. Since the internet is computer based, we can track just about anything. What are your targets? How quickly do you want to get there? What is each of these goals worth to you in terms of income?
What’s happening in your market place?
Before starting, some analysis should be done on the market you are in (size, search volumes, commercial intent). Take a close at your closest competitors and the leaders in your field. How are they doing? What media are they engaging in? In earlier days of online development many established businesses paid little heed to online marketing. That was until companies like Amazon started putting traditional competitors out of business, Betfare and other online gambling sites started taking market share from TABCORP and others.
There are trends taking place right now that will determine which companies see the most successful ROI. Talk to us about what’s happening and where things are headed. Not every trend will be relevant to your business, but you don’t want to slip behind on the ones that are.
All companies will have a unique situation in determining the size of opportunity for them online and the required investment to achieve this. There are technology costs, content creation costs, staff costs as well as outside advisors such as iQuantum.
Once you know the lay of the land, you can chart a course to reach your goals.
Top Five Priorities for Website ROI
As a starting point, these top five points must be covered to make sure you’re on the right path for a good return on investment:
- Rigorous, tested and regularly measured SEO - this includes on and off page optimisation
- A well planned and consistently executed SEM and social media marketing strategy
- Clear and articulated value proposition on your website and in all online messaging
- A well designed website with compelling content that has high usability
- Consistent tracking and monitoring of each activity and campaign
